Farm of the Week: Drover keeping alive Bentham market's strong sheep sale traditions

Fortunately, Raymond Heigh of Brook House Farm loves nothing more than being around sheep. He and his father, Robert, have a flock of 200 commercial Texel-cross and Suffolk-cross breeding ewes and Raymond has his own multi-award winning flock of pedigree Zwartbles plus pedigree Dutch Spotted and pedigree Valais Blacknose.

Raymond is also a drover at his local market, which is just down the country lane from the farm and tells of last week’s late finish being the norm at this time of year.

“The town and the market was rammed with sheep men and women taking two hours to get in and unload. They started queuing to get in before 11 o’clock in the morning. We started selling at 2.30 in the afternoon. There were 3100 ewes. They finished selling at 8.30pm and from then there were 6100 hoggs to sell into the wee small hours. It’s an amazing story.

Raymond works at Bentham twice a week, Tuesday and Wednesday, and while he is well known there, he is better known throughout the country today for the quality of his pedigree Zwartbles flock that has seen him take titles at the Great Yorkshire Show and Royal Highland Show and now sees him as a respected breed judge.

“I started with them in 2005 after we came out of dairying. We’d had a herd of 60 Holstein Friesian dairy cows but it had got to the stage where we were either going to have to get out or go bigger and that would have meant having to spend a lot of money. It just wasn’t going to be worth it.

“There was something different about the Zwartbles. I was attracted by their look, the blaze and socks. They are also an excellent maternal breed and are great for crossing, as well as pure.

Raymond and his mum Wendy, who sadly passed away last year, enjoyed showing their Holstein Friesian cows and Raymond has been showing his Zwartbles for many years, often with and alongside his good friend Martin Preston of Bingley. He’s looking forward to this year’s agricultural show season that starts with Otley Show next month.

“I generally take my best ones to Otley to give them a run out, especially lambs, as it gives them their first taste. It gets them used to it.

“I didn’t go last year because my mum was not well, but I’ve had a few wins there, maybe three or four years taking breed champion. There’s always really good-natured rivalry in the ring. Everybody knows each other and we have a few new and younger show people coming on. I’m looking forward to getting back to Otley. The shearlings are all clipped, the ewes are clipped. You’ve got to be thinking ahead all the time.

The Zwartbles breed is one of the top sheep breeds at the Great Yorkshire Show in terms of number of entries and Harrogate has been the scene of some of Raymond’s proudest moments.

“I’ve had Reserve Overall Breed Champion twice at the Great Yorkshire Show. I’ve also shared male champion and reserve overall at the Royal Highland Show with Martin, with a shearling tup we owned together.

In common with all of the best showmen and women Raymond believes in only keeping the best in his flock.

“I started with half a dozen and today my flock runs to 25 pedigree ewes. I only keep a couple of tups a year. If they’re not absolutely bob on at Easter time they go into the live market. It’s all down to feed costs because if I keep them until August it costs £20 to register them as pedigree and the difference in feeding them those extra months and what I can then sell them for often isn’t worth it.

“Last year at the society sale tup lambs averaged £864 at Carlisle, which was good for Zwartbles tups, and while I enjoyed seeing that, it really is more about trying to breed a decent lamb for me.

“The best prices I’ve achieved have been £1400 for a tup lamb and £1600 for a ewe lamb.

Lambing and choosing tups from other flocks for future breeding is a disciplined process.

“If I had my way I’d have my Zwartbles all lambing singles. That way I would get bigger lambs. I AI them all. I have a stock tup of my own and share some with Martin and with Peter and Susan Addison’s Hayberries flock from Middleton in Teesdale. You have more buying power with more people.

“I AI’d all 25 last August and 23 out of 25 held. One of the benefits of AI is that they then mostly all lamb within 7 days. We are generally thinking of buying tups for a year ahead. If we buy a tup in August the first thing we will do with it is have a load of semen taken off in case it pops its clogs.

Raymond also shows his Dutch Spotted flock that runs to 12 breeding ewes and he has currently 3 Valais Blacknose ewes.

“I sold a Valais Blacknose for £2000 last year. Mine are all MV acredited.

Brook House Farm runs to around 150 acres and Raymond says the main regular incomes, other than from the pedigree breeding, are from the commercial flock and cattle.

“We start lambing the commercial sheep in January and into the February, after the pedigrees. We use Beltex or Beltex-cross tups and run five of them. I normally get 3 or 4 seasons out of them.

“We’ve just started selling this year’s lambs. We sold one at Easter and four last Wednesday. At Easter we topped the price on pence per kilo at £4.31.6p at over 36 kilos. Last week we had one at 40 kilos that made £143; then three at 39.6 kilos made £158 each.

“Some don’t fetch them in until they are at 45 kilos but I don’t see the point in keeping them to reach that because it’s more feed and more cost. It’s the pence per kilo that I look at.

Raymond and Robert have recently altered their store cattle numbers.

“We buy at between 9-11 months old around livestock markets, winter them and sell the following year in September at about 19-20 months in Bentham. We buy Angus, Limousin, Belgian Blue with a bit of shape. It doesn’t matter if they are heifers or bullocks, whatever suits on cost, all suckler bred.

“We used to buy about 40 but in the last couple of years we now buy 20-25 because we take some in for wintering and that seems to pay a bit better. We have around 50 cattle on farm over winter. You also get more manure and an income for overwintering.

Raymond is the third generation to farm at Brook House. It was his mum Wendy’s father Wiliam Joel who started at the farm.